Poetic Love Affair With New York; For Garcia Lorca, the City Was a Spiritual Metaphor

On June 26, 1929, when the poet Federico Garcia Lorca arrived from Madrid to study English at Columbia University's summer session, he was nearly suicidal. His book ''Gypsy Ballads'' had been a best seller in Spain, but some critics were calling his work untutored and accusing him of being a popularizer.

Garcia Lorca believed he had reached a dead end as a poet. At the same time, Salvador Dali, with whom he was in love, had gone off to make the film ''Andalusian Dog,'' directed by Luis Bunuel. And Garcia Lorca's lover Emilio Aladren had taken up with a woman. When Garcia Lorca heard that Fernando de los Rios, a professor who was a friend of his family, was going to lecture at Columbia that summer, he persuaded his father to pay his expenses so he could accompany Los Rios to Columbia. The father thought the trip might be good for his son's poetry.

Garcia Lorca never did learn English at the summer session; in fact, he never even took the final exam. But his 10-month stay resulted in one of his greatest works, ''Poet in New York,'' a collection of poems about the city, written in Spanish on the back of Columbia University stationery.

This summer Columbia is celebrating the centenary of its summer session, and to mark the occasion it has offered a special course on its famous pupil, conducted by Howard Young, Smith Professor of Modern Languages Emeritus at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., who is the author of some of the earliest critical work on Garcia Lorca in English.

Garcia Lorca, who had been born in 1898 into a prosperous farming family in Andalusia, knew little of city life, and when he arrived in New York he was stunned by what he saw. The city was a perfect metaphor for his spiritual condition, its ''extrahuman architecture, its furious rhythm, its geometry and anguish,'' as he described it later, according to a biography by Leslie Stainton, ''Lorca: A Dream of a Life'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). In his poem ''Back From a Walk'' in the ''Poet in New York'' collection (Globe Press Evergreen, 1955) he wrote: ''Heaven-murdered one,//among shapes turning serpent/and shapes seeking crystal,/I'll let my hair grow long.'' (The translation is by the poet Ben Belitt.)

He had never seen such poverty and decay. ''Dawn in New York bears/ four pillars of slime,'' he wrote in another poem, ''Dawn,'' ''and a storm of black pigeons/ that dabble dead water.''

He also witnessed the stock market crash in October 1929, traveling down to Wall Street to see firsthand the crowds and the chaos: ''Time for the cobras to hiss on the uppermost levels,/ for the nettle to jostle the patios and roof-gardens,/'' he wrote in ''Dance of Death,'' ''for the Market to crash in a pyramid of moss,/ time for the jungle lianas that follow the rifles -- / soon, soon enough, ever so soon./ Woe to you, Wall Street!''

Meanwhile he was paying little attention to his Columbia classes. Garcia Lorca distracted his fellow classmates by mimicking the teacher behind his back, Ms. Stainton writes, and tried to hide his lack of English by greeting the dormitory staff with elaborate bows and twirls.

He also spent long stretches of his day in bed. One dorm room acquaintance, John Crow, tired of Garcia Lorca's late-night visits and found his ego ''unbearable.'' But other new friends, like Herschel Brickell, who worked at Henry Holt & Company, were captivated by his exotic presence. Brickell noted particularly his ''lively and eloquent hands.'' At the Brickells' home Garcia Lorca played the piano and sang, and one evening the guitarist Andres Segovia heard him perform and called him ''phenomenal.'' ''He electrified people.''

Sometimes Garcia Lorca would ''disappear and be gone for a couple of days,'' Mr. Young said. He discovered that he could move about much more openly as a gay man in New York than in Spain, with its conservative Roman Catholic culture. His rooms, No. 617 in Furnald Hall and 1231 in John Jay Hall, were close to Riverside Drive, a trysting place after dark. Many pieces in ''Poet in New York'' can be read as coded references to homosexual experiences.

But most important, Garcia Lorca discovered Harlem, with its thriving gay culture. Amid all the city's corruption, it was one place that seemed spiritually pure. ''You Harlem! You Harlem! You Harlem!'' he wrote exultantly in ''The King of Harlem.'' ''No anguish to equal your thwarted vermilions, / your blood-shaken, darkened eclipses,/ your garnet ferocity, deaf and dumb in the shadows,/ your hobbled, great king in the janitor's suit.''

Garcia Lorca's images of black people are stereotypical. They are depicted as purely sensual and primitive. But the injustice of racism left an indelible mark on him and his future writing.

At the same time he was exploring the city, Garcia Lorca was encountering significant new artistic influences. He attended the theater avidly, from Broadway plays to black revues to Chinese operas. The American theater seemed revolutionary to him, Ms. Stainton writes, and its technical advances fascinated him.

Columbia also had one of the strongest Spanish departments in the country, headed by Federico de Onis, and Garcia Lorca was immediately thrust into its intellectual atmosphere. De Onis founded the Hispanic Institute as a center for Spanish culture, and Garcia Lorca joined in its activities. Mr. Young says that the wavering line around the verses of Ruben Dario on the institute logo was drawn by Garcia Lorca.

Meanwhile, an acquaintance, Leon Felipe, was translating Whitman's ''Song of Myself.'' To Garcia Lorca, Whitman was a pure, ''male'' homosexual, not the effeminate figure Garcia Lorca feared that he himself was, Ms. Stainton writes. ''Not for one moment, Walt Whitman, comely old man,/ have I ceased to envision your beard full of butterflies,/'' he wrote in ''Ode to Walt Whitman, ''your corduroy shoulders, worn thin by the moon,/ your chaste, Apollonian thighs.'' His encounter with Whitman resulted in a major shift in style. He abandoned the classical rhyme and metric schemes of previous work and embraced Whitman's long, declarative sentences and free-verse form.

At the same time Garcia Lorca's friend Angel Flores, was translating Eliot's ''Waste Land.'' ''Lorca saw that translation and read it,'' said Mr. Young, ''and some of the vocabulary and feeling for disengagement and broken objects and lack of direction crept into 'Poet in New York.' '' Eliot's influence can be seen in ''New York: Office and Denunciation,'' for instance: ''What shall I do now? Align all the landscapes?/ Muster the lovers who turn into photographs/ and later are splinters of wood, and mouthfuls of blood?'' The lines echo ''The Waste Land:'' ''What shall I do now? What shall I do now?'' And, later in the Eliot poem, ''Shall I at least set my lands in order?''

In March 1930, Garcia Lorca left New York. After his return to Spain, he reclaimed the classical style in his elegy ''Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias,'' written in 1934 about the death of a Spanish bullfighter.

But Garcia Lorca was a changed man. He had witnessed racism firsthand in America, and he saw the similarities between the condition of blacks here and of women and gays in Spain. Without the experience in New York, Mr. Young says, he might not have written his elegy ''Sonnets of a Dark Love,'' generally said to be to his lover Rafael Rodriguez Rapun.

The New York visit also enabled him to become a playwright. Before, Garcia Lorca had tried to write plays, but New York ''provided the springboard into a social, poetic theater,'' Mr. Young said. His plays included ''Blood Wedding,'' ''Yerma'' and ''The House of Bernarda Alba.''

In 1936 civil war broke out in Spain. Garcia Lorca sided with the anti-fascist Republicans but did not fight. The fascist Falangists found him suspect because of his liberal views and because he was famous and homosexual.

His biography recounts that on Aug. 9, a Falangist squad invaded his family's house in Granada. He was thrown down the stairs, hit and taunted. He went into hiding with friends. But on Aug. 16, three Falangist officers arrived to arrest him. Garcia Lorca's hostess asked why the poet was being taken. ''His works,'' one officer answered.

Two days later, the biography relates, Garcia Lorca was driven to a prison in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The next day at dawn, near a stand of olive trees, it is believed, he was shot. His body was never found. In 1986 the Socialist government of Spain built a monument at the spot.

Before his death, Garcia Lorca had reflected back on his time in New York, calling it ''one of the key experiences of his life,'' Mr. Young said. ''He came here to get away from the memories of the love affair in Madrid, and looking for a different kind of poetry.